Fuck You, I'm a Robot

Made a new friend tonight: Paul. He's going into the CIA right after college; he's on some sort of sell-your-soul government scholarship. He spent his previous college years bouncing around the world on their dime, mostly in the Arabic states, since he's learning Arabic. He says he doesn't expect to live past 30, because of his job.
Cute kid. Can recite Venture Bros. scripts from memory; does a mean Monarch voice. Also did his impression of Christian Bale in "American Psycho" for me, despite the fact that I haven't seen that movie yet. He's a very happy guy. Smiles a lot, has a voice like a kittenish fifth-grader. Says he plays demented, tragical characters in Vampire because he likes to try experiencing tragedy. Of course, his character's got six derangements and his Humanity's dropping steadily. Despite this, Paul's natural smiliness shines through, which makes his character's utter amorality and general batshit-ness even creepier, more so than your average demented Malkavian or snotty Invictus.
I am extremely interested by Paul. I think I want to write a story about him; not his characters, him. Possibly involving mages, werewolves, or vampires, real or imaginary. I'll think up something. There are just some people who require writing about.

Also told the Story of Tammy to an interested audience of Mage players at Shoney's yesterday. I think I've gotten to the point where I can talk about it objectively, and even make it into an entertaining story, which is good. (It was when I began to wax sappy about Boyd that they lost interest.)
Robyn was particularly taken with how Tammy had portrayed me, in story, song, and conversation, as being her "dark half." Apparently, this isn't really a normal thing for ex-lovers to do. "That horrible lying bitch," yes, that's normal. "The living representation of the evil which lives within me and which I must spend the rest of my life eradicating from the world and from my own psyche" is slightly less normal. I'm just really, really glad that she seems to have dropped it.
It's so fucking weird to be informed that you're someone's evil half, or the dark side of their destiny, or their lover whom the gods have fated to destroy them. I mean, I can understand it if you've actually consciously decided to be that, but if you're just kind of trying to get by...well, it can mess with your head a little. "Funny, I don't feel like the evil half of you, I feel like me. What, I'm just another part of your identity? Nothing else? That's great, just create my entire identity for me, go ahead, it's not like I'm using it or anything. You know what? Maybe I'm not your Dark Half, maybe you're my Stupid Half. You think that's possible? You know what, to hell with it, I'll be your fucking Dark Half if that's what you want. You want to be a martyr? You want me to destroy you? FINE! I'll do it! And I'll laugh while I'm doing it, too!" It's frighteningly easy to get sucked into this kind of shit.

Been rereading "Dance of Death." The more I think about it, the more I love that Aloysius is really just as fucked-up as Diogenes. It's basically compulsive morality as a result of a psychpathology.
Aloysius never talks about what he was like as a kid, does he? Just the mention of his collection of toy cars, and Aunt Cordelia's talking about how all the other kids picked on him until he learned meditation and fighting techniques from his own nameless Mr. Miyagi (I'm going off memory here, since I can't find that part in "Brimstone"). Aloysius mentions that he has an exceptional memory, going back to before his first birthday. This suggests that the hyper-self-awareness Krasner notices is less of a developed defense mechanism than it is an inborn trait. He probably developed a very advanced sense of morality at a very young age, due to this.
As a little brother, this is a lot to live up to. Diogenes, despite his brilliance, probably had the morality of the average boy child--prone to pulling important limbs off of bugs and poking at toads with sticks. Aloysius, expecting hyper-morality from his genius brother, would have been sickened, and assumed that there was something morally deficient in Diogenes. As a little kid, he wouldn't have understood the whole nature vs. nurture thing (kids don't,) and made what sociologists call a "savage discovery" or "savage assumption"--assuming that since Diogenes acted differently, he was inherently different, inherently evil, and began to treat him as such.
Going by the "Jackson Pollack" comment Diogenes makes (in Aloysius's head, though), I'm guessing there was probably a certain amount of big-brother hero-worship going on when Diogenes was really, really young. Being treated as a pariah would have either forced him to straighten up and adopt Aloysius's own code of morality, or to give up and say, "Fine, I'm a horrible, evil child, look, I killed your mousie, are you happy now?" Being ambitious, he did the second; Diogenes, even as a kid, doesn't strike me as someone who would want to be second-best at anything, even in being a good guy.
I think the scarlet fever wasn't just the turning point for the sake of the disease. I think Aloysius did something to him when he was sick, maybe as punishment of some sort. Doesn't even matter if it was meant to be horrible or not--people who think they're doing good can fuck up someone just as badly as the purest psychopath. And I know this particular part of the theory is really working off Lew's idea about Diogenes fucking with Aloysius when he was sick in that hospital...mirrors it, really, but I'm working backwards here anyway. "You did this to me when I was sick and helpless, now I will fuck you up while you are sick and helpless before I ruin the rest of your life."

Have thought of a beginning line and scenario for my RPS. So that's one good thing.
Have also dug out my P.J. O'Rourke books from the basement and have found, with the help of a dear friend whom I can only talk to over IM, an archive of "Family Ties" scripts. I'd rather see a few episodes of the show, but I don't think any local channels carry it. Possible title: "Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut." Yeah, I know it's a silly idea, but as long as I can write again, I'm going to resurrect as many simple, plotless, silly, smutty ideas as possible and see what happens.
Have also randomly caught a generic sitcom with a cameo by Kevin Smith in which he played himself. And he's really, really balding in this one little spot at the back of his head, which I didn't expect. And he also did a minute over the credits as Silent Bob, smoking uncomfortably at the camera. I am taking this as a Sign. I don't know what as a sign of, but it did cheer me up immensely.

I'm actually feeling very contradictory at the moment. I finally managed to find a drugstore that sold St. John's Wort, although in capsule form. Took a couple of them at lunch (instructions say 2 pills 3 times a day), and I feel better and worse than I have for a while. Before, it was a very dull feeling, like everything was probably going to be OK but I was depressed anyway. Now it's as though I'm right on the edge of something horrible that's going to happen, and I know that something horrible is going to happen and I really don't want it to, but I could care less for no particular reason at all. Does this happen often with St. John's Wort? I do get fucked up on aspirin, remember. I obviously don't have much of a tolerance for, um, anything. Of course, it's possible that it's not the St. John's Wort and it's...something else entirely, don't know what.
I have to go back to college on Sunday and I don't really want to go. I hate my dorm room.

( Cut for more silly whining )

So, great. This year is off to a ripping good start.

The year actually started at a very nice party at Ben's house, where, despite a lack of Daniel and Boyd, I got kissed by two people who really knew what they were doing. It went rapidly downhill from there, as I woke up thirteen hours later with...you guessed it...GOOD MORNING GUILT AND STOMACHACHE!
I think it may have to do with waking up late. My mom has been doing various things to get me to wake up early: pouring cold water over my head, dramatically pulling the blankets off, flashing the lights off and on, shoving hot coffee under my nose. The worst thing I've been in the past week or so is incredibly bored and frustrated at my own lack of writing ability. (Why is it that I think up great things to put down on pixels when I'm in the shower or eating, but as soon as my fingers hit plastic my brain goes blank?)

So off to the drugstore tomorrow to find some St. John's Wort, and also off to Aco Hardware to get some solder and flux for MY NEW SOLDERING IRON WHEE.

Anyway, back to whining. My grandpa on my dad's side is in the hospital, which sucks. My grandmother is in there driving him NUTS and has been for the past four days. They've put him on sedatives so he can try and get some sleep, but every time he closes his eyes she starts shaking him and whining "Wake up, Harold! MOVE YOUR BIG TOE! CAN YOU WIGGLE YOUR TOES?"
I love my grandparents, but my grandmother is seriously scary in a smothering Portnoy's Mom way. I swear she's the leader of the Purple Gang now. Her dad was in the Purple Gang; we have a picture of "Whiskey" Goldfine with his arm around Bugsy Siegel. The Purple Gang hasn't died out, they just passed things on to their daughters, who are now blue-haired matriarchs who whine a lot.
Erm. Rants aside, he ain't doing so well. So there may be a mildly weepy funeral post within the next few weeks or so.

Went to Mass twice this week. The first time was on Christmas Eve, which I didn't mind because it was a family thing, like temple. I did not like the church that Mom and Grandma took us to--the priest didn't seem to know what he was talking about, and I hate it when religious officials are less informed about their faith than I am. It makes me feel like a know-it-all brat. He gave a long speech about the commercialization of Christmas, heavily relying on the use of the phrase "X-Mas". The problem here is that "X-Mas" is actually a very religious usage--it dates back to the very earliest Greek Christians, who used the Greek equivalent of "X" (chi-ro, I think) as a code word for Christ's name in order to escape persecution. I really wanted to tell him about it after the service, but Mom thought it'd be far too rude to correct a priest.
I did manage to distract myself during the communion by:
• Wondering whether zombies had a religion, and if so what they thought about life after death. (I think about zombies when I'm bored. Zombies and sex.)
• Agreeing with my little brother that the priest blessing the wafers looked a lot like Emeril going "BAM!"
• Making up a philosophy of religion based on the existence of chocolate. It schismed over Hershey vs. Godiva.
The second Mass was today. Mom and Grandma dragged me to a Healing Mass. I am not sure why; I don't think I've given them any indication that I need to be healed of anything. The monk (an actual monk, with robes and everything! They still wear them) came around and blessed everyone, first with a relic, then with holy oil. I scrubbed off the holy oil but I've still got a big red blistery spot where he put it (IT REACTED WITH MY ACNE MEDICATION I AM NOT ANTICHRIST SHUT UP).
Mom wants to go to another Mass on Sunday. Apparently there is a very nice church called Kirk In The Hills which has a relic room and has tours after Mass. I don't think I could take another religious service this week, no matter how cool seeing rotted bits of dead holy people might be.
Story idea: Cloning saints. Or possibly zombie saints.

Have been working through huge pile of books I checked out from local library. We went in to pick up a book on tape for Mom, I gravitated towards the SF section and went a little nuts. I've got two Connie Willis books that I've read before but I love--one is called "Bellwether" and is honestly more sociological fiction that science fiction. The other is "Passages," is about a scientist who is studying Near Death Experiences, and is currently sparking a weird "Re-Animator" idea in my brain. I've also got a story collection that's supposed to contain stories that reflect the cultural and social issues of the 1950s, a couple of Nebula collections, the aforementioned Harlan Ellison collection, "Idoru" by William Gibson, and a Rudy Rucker collection.
Have also been trying to listen to "OK Computer," but it's not nearly as good as I thought it would be. The songs sound all the same except for "Fitter Happier," which I think is sung by Stephen Hawking. It is making me want to write about paranoia, though. But I've already used up my allotment of Philip K. Dick for this fandom. "Diamond Dogs" is up next, and after that I'll make a playlist of dystopian songs. Maybe I'll write something about a dystopian future. Would that be too depressing? I like dystopian futures. I like depressing things.

Apparently I am an INTP or NTIP or whatever you call it. Personality test thing.

Things are going better, at the moment. I think. I had a nice long talk with nyghtshayde, who can always calm me down when I'm feeling horrible. And I'm losing myself in the remix story, which is good. I still need a title for it, but that will have to come at the end--it's due tomorrow at noon. I have eighteen hours to get it done.

Apparently Tammy has an AMAZING ability to awaken psychic powers in other people. She's just discovered some neat new powers in her girlfriend, and is taking on some new "students" at the same time. I think her aspirations have moved from fantasy novelist (middle school) to handicapped rights crusader (10th grade) to gay rights crusader (12th grade) to cult leader. Has the "frigid, cold, twisted folly of [my] love" really pushed her that far over the edge? In any case, I'll be sure to look for the booth of the High Enlightened Coven of the Bookbats right next to the Scientologists in five years down on Special Interest Group Row at the Ann Arbor Art Fair.

What's funny is that I really was going to write the Bookbats into a novel as a cult. The book we were writing in middle school, if I haven't explained this to everyone already, was about a race of Bookbats who were Good Kind Gentle Creative Tolerant People, with wings I think, who lived on a planet right next to a race of Bookburners who were Evil Mean Nasty Warmongering Censoring Intolerant Bigots. Yay for subtle social commentary.
The story was that the Bookburners blew up the Bookbats' planet, and all the souls of the Bookbats were reborn into Bookburner bodies. There was a whole underground movement of Bookbats, with priestesses and stuff. The two main characters were Tammy and I, of course. Tammy was the Princess of the Bookbats who had a Right To Rule because she was of the Royal Family Who Everyone Loved, and I was her street-smart loyal bodyguard who had some kind of magical sword bond to her or something. Oh, and there was a subplot with the Evil Twisted Mean Deceptive Hot Sexy ambassador seducing her mom.
(Wow, this is bringing back memories. I really liked writing that book. Missed out on a year of algebra because of it, but that was OK because I'd already taken that particular class in 9th grade at the International Academy and then I took it the next year in 11th grade. Now it looks like I'm going to have to take it again next year for credits.)
Anyway, we modified it a bit during 10th grade to allow for werewolves. Tammy seemed to think she was a werewolf at the time, or a wolf spirit, or a furry. Or something, I don't know. She liked wolves. So now the Bookburners were oppressing the werewolves. The Evil Twisted Mean Deceptive Ambassador had a son, and he was the head of the police state and was trying to get into Tammy's pants.
So the novel I had in mind now involves the Bookbats as a cult who believe that you can receive a Bookbat soul by converting and going through all sorts of rituals (they base their belief in the "legend" of the Bookbats, which is based on the story in the very early middle-school draft). They particularly like werewolves because they believe that werewolves are already blessed with a Bookbat soul and don't have to work for it. They are also trying to escape the OMG Atheist Repressive Police State Government, whose biggest concern at the moment is the crumbling inner city (inhabited mostly by werewolves and werewolf gangs). The ending shall remain (for now) a surprise.
I'm trying not to have any obvious good guys/bad guys here. I want to paint each faction with the complexity of motive that they deserve. Even repressive governments, creepy cults, and violent lycanthropic gangs have their sympathetic sides.

Hah. Tammy's taken my Evil Lesbian Sekrit Agent character out of her book because I "don't deserve to be in it." This is the main difference between she and I: She writes to affirm her own beliefs and keep herself on her moral high horse, I write what makes a good story. At least, I try.

ETA: Her flunky Mara just IMed me and bitched me out again. Apparently, Tammy encourages her to do so. I didn't know that. I'm glad I know that now. It makes things a little easier to know how petty Tammy was being too.

Tonight was, to say the least, interesting.

The night started out with my ex-girlfriend informing me that she had created an online journal and inviting me to view it. Apparently, she was pissed. Very pissed. Flaming from the nose, so to speak, mainly because of Daniel's orgy joke. I've posted more offensive things in my journal, so I'm not entirely sure why she chose that one to pick on. Was it the mention of stuffed squirrels?

She is also of the firm belief that ancient Greek goddesses talk to her inside her head and were advising her on what to do with me. She got highly offended when I implied (okay, came out and stated, probably rather harshly) that it sounded like schizophrenia to me. (Piety, insanity, what's the difference? I rethink that now--reality and truth again, remember? If sanity is proximity to reality then is insanity proximity to truth, or is it just a special kind of insanity? In any case classical definitions of both no longer seem to apply.)

She was going on about a spell she intended to cast in order to erase all memories of me and of the relationship from her mind (anyone who has seen "Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind" should be able to see the problems in this scheme) and telling me about her mental shields, when she happened to mention some advice that a friend of hers had given her. This triggered a strong, short feeling of deja vu within me. I mentioned this to Tammy, and...

For those of you who I haven't mentioned this to, I get deja vu at the stupidest times. This isn't "wow, something like this has happened to me before" deja vu, either. I'll have dreams, forget about them, and then something will happen months later which exactly mirrors the events in the dream, at which point I will remember the dream--hence the deja vu. It's annoying as hell when it happens, and it's never anything constructive--usually something small like pouring sand out of my shoe or hitting a Koosh ball. I occasionally try to change the events, if they go on long enough. Just to see what happens. When I do this, I inevitably get confused as to whether I dreamed myself trying to change the events. I've been told that this is my memory of the dream changing as the thing that happened changed. (Time travel in real life, hooray--but I'd rather have a DeLorean than the occasional mental temporal displacement.)
ETA: Any nice, rational, neurophysical explanation for this type of deja vu would be dearly welcomed.

In this case, I'd had a dream where Tammy and I had been broken up and she had been telling me about advice that particular friend gave her. The dream had happened before Tammy and I had even been in a relationship, and I had dismissed it as a typically Freudian wish-fulfillment dream at the time. I mentioned this to Tammy, offhandedly, who immediately (well, actually it was after some amount of her clamming up and me being pushy) identified it as "mental memory telepathy." Okay. Well. Apparently it is a rare and treasured gift and mine is the strongest she's ever seen.

Now comes the really, really, really WTF part. Tammy made the decision that she would take it upon herself to "burn my gift out." I'm not sure how she would have done this, but I was naturally incensed at the idea. I didn't see what right she had to try to take away what is apparently some kind of freaky psychic power that I've got, and I told her so.
Eventually, she agreed to teach me how to control the power. Not sure how this is going to work out online, but...ok.

I don't know what to do about all this except to take it in stride and see what happens. At the very least, I'll get to do a lot of meditating. At the very most, I'll start to develop psychic powers and probably either be really freaked out and convert to Wicca or put on a spandex costume and go around fighting crime.

( Cut for whining about relationships )

And I'm way behind on my NaNo as well. I've only written 2,670 words and I should be up to at least 10,000 by now. I need to figure out motivations and I hate doing that.
I've noticed that it's very difficult for me to write a story with a specific theme (emotional or otherwise) in mind. "Reeling Off The Years" only worked because I was thinking about how to get from Darth Vader to chaos theory in a conversationally logical manner. The themes of distance and missed opportunities emerged while I wasn't watching--I didn't even mean to make Junie into an emotionally frustrated oh-man-I-hope-that's-not-my-future who gradually got slightly meaner and less tactful throughout the meal (possibly because of the beer; I can't handle alcohol too well either).
I say this because I'm currently trying to formulate a couple of stories that really have very broad themes. "From the Gods", a kind-of fic based off the story that George wrote about Marty in "Reeling Off The Years", is about a man who comes to believe that his son, and eventually all teenagers, are actually aliens. It's going to be a very chilling and psychological story and will be a fantastic metaphor for the generation gap if I ever figure out how to write it. And the untitled Marty/Marty (which I am considering naming after a Guns 'N' Roses song or possibly a Motley Crue song or maybe using a lyric from either of these bands for the title, since all the fics I've done for BTTF so far have had similar title origins) now has all sorts of emotional subtext (thank you Nightspore) that I don't know how to write. I want to make it subtle, but when I actually set out to write a fic with psychological subtext, the motivations tend to come shooting straight to the surface (see "Divine Rehabilitation of Jason Mewes" for an example).
So I need to keep "Ramble On" as plot-based as possible in order to let all this quietly shine through, while keeping everyone's motivations and personalities in mind. This is going to be very difficult. I just have to remember that it's my first time and if I don't get it finished by the end of November it isn't that big of a deal.

Had a wonderful weekend. Went over to pinglederry's house for a sleepover.
We watched "Dogma", the uncut version, which I had never seen before. I'd only seen it on Comedy Central, which tends to circumsize its movies.

Then we doused each other in a great deal of cream soda. She stole my socks, and then I stole her socks.
(This, dear reader, is what is known as a euphemism. They're fun, aren't they?)
It was a very good time in general and I am extremely pleased it happened. Don't be jealous, gyr_falre, you'll get your chance. IF YOU BRING ME THE BROOMSTICK OF THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST, THAT IS!!!!!

Got stories up on Fanfiction.Net under Kleenexwoman. Go read 'em.

Am also, apparently, going out with Tammy and have been for several weeks. Did not know this until 5th hour today. Crap.
Why don't people TELL me these things?